Audrey Tautou

Audrey Tautou: The Star Who Would Not Move

Amélie became the highest-grossing French-language film ever released in American cinemas, taking more than $33 million, winning four César Awards and drawing five Academy Award nominations. Hollywood, which reads box office as an invitation, duly issued one. Its leading actress declined and stayed in Paris. "I am, at the end of the day, a French actress," she said. "My home, my community, my career is rooted in France. I would never move to Los Angeles."

Beaumont and Montluçon

She was born on 9 August 1976 in Beaumont, in the Puy-de-Dôme, and raised in Montluçon in the French interior, a long way from any film industry. Her father, Bernard, was a dental surgeon; her mother, Eveline Marie Laure Née Nuret, was a teacher. They named her after Audrey Hepburn, a decision that turned out to be either prophetic or a burden depending on the day, since the comparison would follow her for the whole of her career. She showed an interest in acting early.

Cours Florent

She trained at the Cours Florent, the private Paris drama school that has supplied a large share of the modern French cinema, studying English and Italian alongside acting, and also attended the Catholic University of Paris. She made her television debut at eighteen.

Her feature debut came in 1999 with Venus Beauty Institute, Tonie Marshall's ensemble comedy set in a Paris beauty salon. The performance drew immediate critical attention and won her the César Award for Most Promising Actress, the French industry's designated signal that a career has begun. In 2000 she received the Prix Suzanne Bianchetti, awarded to the most promising young French actress of the year. Within two years of leaving drama school she had collected both of the prizes France gives for arriving.

Amélie

In 2001 Jean-Pierre Jeunet cast her as Amélie Poulain, a solitary Montmartre waitress who arranges other people's happiness by stealth. The film is a piece of engineered enchantment, saturated in green and gold, and it required a performer capable of holding an entire visual fantasy together with a face. Tautou's contribution is the reason it works: she plays a character who could easily curdle into whimsy as watchful and faintly amused, permitting the audience in without ever begging.

The consequences were enormous and, for her, largely unwelcome. The film became the highest-grossing French-language release in American theatrical history, took four Césars and five Oscar nominations, and made her face internationally legible. She has been consistent since about how little she enjoyed it, disliking the attention that came with sudden fame.

The Refusal

What followed is more interesting than what a conventional career would have done with the same opening. She went to London for Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things in 2002, a bleak thriller about undocumented immigrants that is almost the photographic negative of Amélie. She returned to Jeunet in 2004 for A Very Long Engagement, a First World War drama, after which she was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Her one large Hollywood production came in 2006, opposite Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code. The same year she made Priceless with Gad Elmaleh, a French romantic comedy, and thereafter the American offers were treated as optional. In 2009 she played Coco Chanel in Coco Before Chanel, a biographical drama that drew six César nominations and four BAFTA nominations, and in 2011 she led the romantic comedy-drama Delicacy, nominated for the Best Film César. She appeared as Simone Melchior Cousteau in The Odyssey in 2016.

Her own account of the arithmetic is unsentimental. "It's very difficult to get great parts: first as a female actress; second as a foreign actress; and now as an actress over 40," she has said. "But that's fine. I don't need, and I don't want, to make a career there."

The Chanel Muse

In 2009 she became the face of Chanel No. 5, succeeding Nicole Kidman, in advertisements directed by Jeunet, the same collaborator who had made her famous. She has also represented L'Oréal and Montblanc, and the French press took to calling her the Chanel muse. She hosted the opening and closing ceremonies of the Cannes Film Festival in 2013 and served on the jury of the Berlin Film Festival in 2015.

Why Audrey Is Called a Genius

The honest position is that no critical authority in the record calls Tautou a genius, and that her case rests on craft plus one very large decision. The craft is a specific and unfashionable kind: she is a minimalist working in a national cinema that prizes minimalism. Amélie is a film of extravagant artifice, every frame manipulated, and its centre had to be a person who did almost nothing. Tautou builds the character out of stillness, timing and a gaze that arrives a half-beat before the line, which is why the whimsy never collapses into cuteness. The same restraint is what let her cross into the grim register of Dirty Pretty Things without any visible adjustment of gear, and what made her Chanel a study in ambition rather than an impersonation.

The decision is the more unusual achievement. Handed the largest international opening any French actress of her generation has received, she calculated that the parts available to a foreign woman in Hollywood were not worth the relocation, and declined. That is not artistic genius; it is a clear-eyed reading of an industry, made at twenty-five, that most people in her position get wrong. Her subsequent list of collaborators, Jeunet, Frears, the César-nominated French productions, suggests she read it correctly.

Against all this: her body of work is smaller than the fame, she has been protected by a single iconic role she did not create, and being named after Audrey Hepburn and then resembling her is luck rather than talent. The word that fits is not genius but judgement, exercised early and held.

Legacy

Tautou dated the singer Matthieu Chedid between 2007 and 2008 and the marketing director Yann Le Bourbouac'h from 2016 to 2019; in 2019 she adopted a daughter from Vietnam. She attended Catholic schools but says she is "not officially" Catholic. Her lasting significance is double: she is the face of the most internationally successful French film in living memory, and she is the rare star of such a film who treated the success as a thing to be survived rather than exploited. Twenty years on, Amélie Poulain still sells Paris to people who have never been there, and the woman who played her never left.